"And can we talk about the insanity of a national day in honor of the sad state of gays? Can you name another special interest group that (a) MUST have at least one representative on every television series and (b) that character can only be the witty, saintly sage to whom the pathetic heterosexuals go for guidance?

Give me a break.

How about a National Day of Silence for middle-aged white Christian men, arguably the most maligned group in the world right now.

Monday, April 13, 2009

The recent arrest of an abortion clinic operator in Hialeah, FL was too little too late. Even the chief of police was scandalized at the absurdity of the situation.

Baby Shanice was born alive at between 21 and 23 weeks on July 20, 2006 and put into a biohazard trash bag. Six days later Hialeah police were tipped off by three individuals and found the body in a closet. In the interim, the body may have been concealed on the clinic’s roof. By secreting the body in the July heat, the clinic operator, Belkis Gonzalez, effectively thwarted investigators and prevented the medical examiner from determining “exactly the cause of death of the infant,” State Attorney’s office spokesman Ed Griffith told the Florida Catholic.

The absurdity of the State Attorney’s office’s decision, after two years, to now pursue a minimalist course of prosecution was not lost on the chief of police.

“I would have liked for it to have become a bona fide homicide charge. However, we do not make the laws. If anyone is outraged, I share it with them, but they have to understand we operate within the legal system,” Mark Owens, Hialeah Police Chief told the Miami Herald.

John Wayne meets the pointed headed bureaucrats, and, as usual, the bureaucrats won. After all, how can we prosecute manslaughter here when we have already ignored over 50 million other cases?

The consolation prize is that Ms Gonzalez has been arrested for tampering with evidence and practicing murde….we mean medicine, without a license. The penalty is a minimum of one year, and a max of 15 in the slammer.

Given the handling of the case so far, the betting window is open as to whether madam abortionist will plea bargain it down to community service. Perhaps she can clear road kill off the Florida highways, since that is about the only value prosecutors in the Sunshine state put on human life.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Writing shortly after the Second Vatican Council, then Joseph Ratzinger said, “The processes of history take time.” Now as Pope, he is preparing a new encyclical letter dealing with the elements of a just economy, and he is taking time in completing it. Why? Because as he goes deeper and deeper into the subject, with the live laboratory of the current meltdown in front of him, he has come face to face with the acting human person that undergirds all economic activity. There he sees all the competing ideals, emotions and weaknesses that can only make sense when seen through the humanity of Jesus Christ.

It is Christ that has to be found in the vortex of the countless prudential decisions and competing values and virtues that make an economy workable. And if people don’t find him there, they probably won’t be find him at all. And without Christ at the center, there can be no genuine human work, just the ceaseless activity of men chasing each other frantically around an open grave until one by one they have heart attacks and fall in.

In all economic matters the important, but unspoken part of the question is the phrase “to or for whom?” One need only to take the term frequently used in real estate, “highest and best use,” and apply it to some of the more controversial eminent domain cases to see how many values are packed into day to day economic decisions. And since God made the world, not man, theories about what is highest and best should logically take his viewpoint into consideration.

In a book written after the last great period of economic soul searching in the 1930s, the noted Jesuit writer C.C. Martindale commented that compared to his involvement with questions related to work, business and labor relations, dealing with sexual matters in the confessional was child’s play. He tells the story of being in a taxi and saying to the driver that the man with him was an ardent Red. To which the driver responded that in his experience, once people lost their money they were happy to be Communists, and once they had money they were just as happy to be capitalists. One wonders if that man is driving a taxi today in Washington, D.C.

In that great city, in contrast to the care and caution being exhibited by the Pope, Congress runs wild through the street strewing money left and left. And while Rome struggles to be rational, faith-filled, and principled, Washington is so frantic it doesn’t even take time to read the very bills it has written. Mark Twain, that great American theologian, had it figured out long time ago, “To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.” Like the men described by the taxi driver, oscillating between two radical extremes, they have lost both their nerve and their wits. One hopes that through the process of time, with a little help from what the Pope has to say, they will regain both their nerve and their wits.